Damages Quickly Established That Patty Hewes Was a Force to be Reckoned With

Today, we look at how the pilot of Damages quickly established just how much Patty Hewes was a force to be reckoned with.

This is a delayed Year of Great TV Episodes, where every day from March 2nd on this year (plus January 1st-March 1st of 2024), we’ll take a look at great TV episodes. Note that I’m not talking about “Very Special Episodes” or episodes built around gimmicks, but just “normal” episodes of TV shows that are notable only because of how good they are.

All this month, I’ll be spotlighting great women-centric TV episodes.

Damages was one of those TV series where it had a brilliant opening season that told a mostly complete story, with maybe enough material for a good second season…and then it went on for five seasons. When you’re dealing with such larger-than-life characters like Glenn Close’s Patty Hewes, there’s only a certain amount of time that you can spend with them ALMOST getting their comeuppance before it just gets to be too silly.
In the first episode of the series, we were introduced to Rose Byrne’s Ellen Parsons, a young lawyer who gets hired by the powerful litigator, Patty Hewes (Glenn Close).
Ellen is about to sign with another firm when she gets contacted by Hewes and Associates. There’s a great bit where Hollis Nye (the late, great Phillip Bosco), the grandfatherly head of the law firm Ellen spurns to interview with Patty, meets with Ellen, and makes her sign the back of his business card, where he writes, “I was warned,” so he can say he at least warned her about Patty before she joins Patty.
Patty’s major case at the moment is taking down the billionaire, Arthur Forbisher (played brilliantly by Ted Danson), who stole the pension fund of his employees, but no one can prove that he did it.
They need to place him in Florida with his broker (his claim is that he had a pre-arranged plan to sell his stock, and that he wasn’t insider trading), and someone who DID see him at the time period a few years earlier was Ellen’s boyfriend/fiancee (he proposes in the episode)’s sister, Katie, who is a good friend of Ellen’s.
Forbisher is bankrolling Katie’s new restaurant in New York. Forbisher’s lawyer, Ray Fiske, is played by Željko Ivanek (he was GREAT in the role. He won an Emmy for Best Supporting Actor), and he is trying to get Katie to sign a NEW NDA, that expands how long she can’t talk about things (wink wink nudge nudge).
Ellen realizes that Patty only hired her to get to Katie, but Ellen thinks that Katie SHOULD testify against Forbisher. However, Katie isn’t interested, but when Forbisher’s guys seemingly murder her dog (and leave a note saying “Quiet”), she now wants to take Forbisher down.
Well, at the end of the episode, someone gives Patty the collar of Katie’s murdered dog, and so we know that Patty was the one who was actually behind the dog’s murder to push Katie in the direction that she wanted her to go. We knew Patty was a hardcore lady, but not THAT hardcore. Close would win an Emmy for the role (and the pilot is the episode she submitted).
The whole thing is tied up in a framing sequence of six months in the future, where Ellen is arrested, covered in blood, and her fiancee is found murdered in the bathtub of their apartment. After not speaking the whole sequence set in the future, she ends the episode with the great line, “Get me a lawyer.” The whole season takes place in the two separate timelines until they intersect in the last few episodes (so we have to constantly wonder, “DID Ellen murder her fiancee? If not her, who did it?”).
This whole two timelines concept works well the FIRST time you did it. Multiple times? Not so much. Todd A. Kessler, Glenn Kessler, and Daniel Zelman wrote the episode (and created the show together).

Okay, if I’m going to have 301 more of these, I could use suggestions, so feel free to email me at brian@poprefs.com!